ARCHITECTURE VIEW

ARCHITECTURE VIEW; In Paris, a Love Affair Between New and Old

By PAUL GOLDBERGER

Published: April 2, 1989

PARIS—
The French have always had a fondness for the word ''cohabitation.'' And surely no term more aptly describes the state of public architecture in this city right now, as I. M. Pei's glass pyramid in the center of the Louvre, the very symbol of the late 20th century's intrusion into classical Paris, opens not to the furor that was feared but to a general sense of relief. Almost nobody thinks of the pyramid as being as bad as its critics expected when the design was announced in 1984, and more and more Parisians seem willing to go further and say that the pyramid may even be worth admiring. It is fashionable now to believe that modernism can cohabit with classicism quite comfortably, and that the late 20th century may yet leave a positive mark on Paris.

Only a few years ago the state of modern architecture in Paris was so wretched that no one could be blamed for wanting to freeze the city's center as it was and banish everything new to the outskirts. But Paris is not Colonial Williamsburg with better food, much as some tourists may wish it to be, or even Florence or Venice or Bath, where the architecture of a particular period sets the tone. Time has always been visible in Paris. This is a city that has always lived in the present, and its urban fabric consists of layers of other presents, one atop the other.

For most of the years since World War II that view has been harder to sustain, mainly because modern architects in France seemed intent on destroying the spirit of Paris, not on creating buildings that deserved to take their place within it. The symbolic beginning of the change was the Pompidou Center, now a decade old, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's high-tech toy of a museum that brought an astonishing level of cultural as well as architectural energy to the center of Paris. But now the face of the whole city has been altered through a series of modernist monuments that prove not only that public architecture is alive and well and living in Paris, but that modernism can respond to the larger and deeper demands of the city's great urban fabric.

The Louvre - about which more in a moment - is right now the most conspicuous as well as the freshest of the so-called ''Grands Projets'' that have been transforming the city since 1982, when the government under Francois Mitterrand launched a program that made it the most active builder of public monuments in modern French history. But there is also the Musee d'Orsay, the 19th-century museum in a converted train station that was finished in 1986; the Institute of the Arab World, completed in 1987 on the Left Bank, and La Villette, an immense complex at the city's northeastern edge that includes a vast science museum and an exhibition hall, an extraordinary park and a music center.

And there will be much more shortly: a new opera house at Place de la Bastille, to open in July, that will replace Paris's great 19th-century opera house, which will become a theater for dance; a 35-story office building in the form of an open cube, also to open in July, that from a distance looks like a square arch and will culminate the vista from the Arc de Triomphe to La Defense, the office complex at the western edge of the city; and, finally, new quarters for the Ministry of Finance in eastern Paris. The architectural quality of the projects is uneven. The Musee d'Orsay, designed by Gae Aulenti, comes off as a graceless battle between new and old in which the works of art are reduced to the role of hapless spectators. The new opera house, designed by Carlos Ott, would be a decent enough corporate headquarters, but its cool sleekness only makes one yearn for the great building by Charles Garnier that it will follow but hardly replace.

But the Arab Institute, by Jean Nouvel, is a triumph of modern urbanism, a lyrical building that manages to be intricate and powerful at the same time. And the archlike cube, designed by the late J. O. Spreckelsen and completed under the supervision of Paul Andreu, is an abstract object of considerable presence, and at least begins to bring the banal complex of La Defense into the orbit of the figurative, urbane and classical world that is Paris.

The arch under construction at La Defense is a pure geometric form that also happens to function as a building. The same could be said of yet another project planned for La Defense: a slender, cylindrical office tower roughly 1,200 feet high designed by Jean Nouvel, architect of the Arab Institute. This glass-and-metal tower, which would grow gradually lighter in color as it rises, would stand just beside the arch like an upended pencil. Its elegant but impractical design won a prestigious international competition earlier this year, but there is considerable sentiment against it, even at this moment of rising sympathy for modernist monuments in Paris.

The Grands Projets are not all so ruthlessly abstract. But paradoxically, in this very abstraction may lie salvation, or at least appropriateness to monumental Paris. For the intriguing thing is the extent to which these abstract objects fall firmly within the tradition of the vast, freestanding object-monuments of Paris, both built and unbuilt. There is the Arc de Triomphe, the obelisk of the Place de La Concorde, the columns in the Place Vendome and the Place de la Bastille, the Eiffel Tower - abstract shapes all - not to mention the highly abstract visionary schemes of the 18th-century architects Boulee and Ledoux, which are icons in the history of French architecture. And now, to all of this, is added this cube, this pyramid, and perhaps this cylinder.